Converging Trajectories: Crossing Borders, Building Bridges is an invitational group exhibition of works by 42 artists I have encountered through travel and ongoing research. Each is on a personal trajectory in pursuing a career as a visual artist. My own trajectory of reinvention began three years ago as I transitioned into starting and building my art consulting enterprise. Through me there is an intersection of paths that marks a moment in our histories. With their participation in this exhibit, the artists become connected with one another and with viewers from the Phoenix area and elsewhere who visit Modified Arts during the exhibition. Most of the artists are from Arizona and Brazil with others from Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Charlotte, Chicago, Mexico City, and San Francisco. The vast majority of the artists started producing work during the past 10-15 years in times of rapid technological advancement, increasing globalization albeit polarization, and the end and beginning of centuries and millennia. Of the 42 artists in the exhibition, 21 are currently based in Brazil making this the most ambitious showing of contemporary art from Brazil in Phoenix and the Southwestern United States.

With rapid-fire changes, and especially with the rampant development and use of technology, social networks, and cheaper air travel, our own worlds continue to both expand and contract exponentially. More than ever before, we are able to recognize that the people of Earth strive for similar things in life and share dreams for the future. Artists made the works in this exhibition in response to personal, social, political, and economic issues of the human condition thereby blurring mapped nationalistic and cultural boundaries.

The art and exhibition concept are more relevant than ever in Arizona and the United States through the lenses of globalization, shifting populations, economic volatility, and human rights and dignity. The artworks are as diverse in content as in the origins and experiences of the artists who made them. Unbelievably, it is still easier for art to cross lines drawn on political maps than it is for many of the art makers to obtain visas for travel to Phoenix for the exhibition opening. This is especially true for artists living in the Americas south of us.

A major goal for this exhibit is to provide Arizona viewers with fresh and vital art for multi-faceted viewing, interpretation, and enjoyment during seemingly endless, hot summer days and vituperative political and social debates. Another is to provide opportunities for the artists in the exhibition and in our community to see their work in a broader context and different arena than they may have previously.

I am assembling the art, bringing it to Phoenix, and providing opportunities for people to connect with art and artists, many of whom are showing their work in the United States for the first time. Information about the exhibition is being broadcast from Phoenix to people around the world through the use of technology, thereby making it possible to be interconnected across political, language, social, and cultural borders.

Building bridges through lively discussions of themes relating to art and culture, rather than subjects like politics and religion, allows us to establish common ground for understanding others and improving our lives and those of others in our community and beyond. This exhibition requests viewer response to and reflection about the art and offers interconnection and understanding between people while abating fear of the other or the unknown.

Ted G. Decker

August 2010

This exhibition is made possible by support from Kim Larkin and Adam Murray/Modified Arts and Ted Decker Catalyst Fund.* In-kind support was provided by Chico Fernandes (Rio de Janeiro), Bill Fielder/Bill’s Custom Frames, Joe Jankovsky, Lisa MacCollum/Lisa Mac Studio, Paul Jacques, and to Verónica Villanueva and Brent Bond.

Special thanks to each of the participating artists, Justin P. Germain, those who made the journey to Phoenix for the opening, Valber Silva, (Niterói, Brazil), and to the following galleries for their support: in Recife, Galeria Mariana Moura; in Rio de Janeiro, A Gentil Carioca, Amarelonegro Arte Contemporânea, Anita Schwartz Galeria de Arte, Galeria Artur Fidalgo, and Laura Marsiaj Arte Contemporânea; and in São Paulo, Novembro Arte Contemporânea and Zipper Galeria.

We all follow our own path and, by design of fate or coincidence, individual paths cross those of others. Converging Trajectories: Crossing Borders, Building Bridges is one of those intersections. The show brings together diverse examples of contemporary art without a predisposed thematic element—seemingly the only link between the artists is the curator. But the exhibition is not only a tool to organize and build interest in contemporary art. It serves as a framework to construct a community in which the cultures of the curator, the artists, and the viewers are brought together to re-code assumptions about group identity. The artists are forever connected through the exhibition. The viewer engages with the art and therefore with the artist. Thoughts and ideas create a dialogue. Inferences are made. Connections become clear. The experience of the exhibition unifies and defines the constructed community.

Each of the works serves as a window into the artist’s complex relationship with our world. They have constructed their visual language from personal experiences derived from views both unique and shared. They each interpret existential and cultural anxiety, clash and engagement between cultures, socio-economic realities within communities, cultural integrity, and self-affirmation. But they all express personal views unique to the people they represent. The act of bringing together various people hints towards a human community, not by promoting a universal concept of culture, but instead by celebrating diversity.

Because it is unrealistic to define contemporary art with any degree of finality Converging Trajectories serves as a glimpse into test cases of evocative global art. These instances of originality and experimentation intersect in the exhibition, and from within the interstices between cultures, a complex community develops and further shrinks our world by breaking down liminal boundaries.